The Stormfront

This site is about a radical change I believe is coming to education specifically and society at large. Radical change is not unknown to our world. My son was born 2 years ago and introduced a radical change to my life. Even education has undergone changes in the last hundred years. What is different this time though is the speed at which these changes are going to happen.

That is why I call the signs leading up to the change the Stormfront. What follows is going to wreak havoc on the systems we have setup to educate children. The various education reformers I have seen are all confident the school system can adapt to changes. What they have a hard time with though is the actual rate of change is going to be unlike anything we have seen before.

Here’s an example.

Based on this data from Ray Kurzweil it took 35 years for 25% of US households to have a telephone. In today’s terms we would call this a landline. In other words, a fixed phone in your house. I just saw that in 2010, landlines were in 75% of US homes. Today, 5 years later that number is only 60%. So 40% of US homes no longer have a landline. Just 20 years ago, that idea would have been inconceivable. This trend is accelerating as the older generations die. The new generations have smart phones and will never have a land line. The same thing is relevant with cable TV. Last year (2014) showed the first ever drop in the number of US cable subscriptions. What is more worrying to the cable companies is that many young people are not getting cable to start with.

With the Internet, ideas can sweep the world overnight. This supercharges the rate of change for society. This trend will only increase with real time translation of all the world’s content.

Bottom line is schools have no idea of the Stormfront of change heading their way.